{"id":268,"date":"2015-03-12T15:56:44","date_gmt":"2015-03-12T14:56:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.magnusmanske.de\/?p=268"},"modified":"2015-03-12T23:19:52","modified_gmt":"2015-03-12T22:19:52","slug":"linkin-mash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/magnusmanske.de\/wordpress\/archives\/268","title":{"rendered":"Linkin mash"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I recently blogged<\/a> about automatic descriptions based on Wikidata<\/a>. And as nice as these APIs are, what could they be used for? You got it – demo time!<\/p>\n

Linkin Park<\/a> band member Dave Farrell has no article on English Wikipedia (only a redirect to Linkin Park, which is unhelpful). He does, however, have a Wikidata item<\/a> with articles in 35 other languages. This is, essentially, the situation you get on smaller Wikipedias – lots of articles in other languages, just not in yours. There is information about the subject, but unless you can read any of those other languages, it’s closed to you.<\/p>\n

On English Wikipedia, I created a template<\/a> for this situation a while ago. Instead of a redlink, you specify the target and the Wikidata item, and you get the “normal” redlink, as well as links to Wikidata and Reasonator. An improvement, undoubtedly, but still rather clunky.<\/p>\n

Thus, I resorted to something from the 90’s – a “mash-up” of multiple existing parts. A little bit of Wikipedia mobile view, my automatic description API, the Wikipedia API to render Wikitext as HTML, season with some JavaScript, and boom! we have a Wikipedia clone – with a twist. By default, this mash-up will happily display the Linkin Park<\/a> article; however, under the “Band members” section (about the middle of the page), Dave Farrell now has just another, normal link:<\/p>\n

\n
\"Band<\/a>

Band section on Wikipedia<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\"Band<\/a>

Band section in the mash-up<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The mash-up code recognized the code generated by the template on Wikipedia, and replaced it with a normal-looking, special link. Clicking on that “Dave Farrell” will lead to a live-generated page<\/a>. It uses the automatic description API to get Wikitext plus infobox, then uses the Wikipedia API to render that as (mobile) HTML. And while the text is a little bit dull, it looks just like another Wikipedia page rendered through the mash-up, image and all.<\/p>\n

I am well aware of the current limitations of this approach, including the potential deterrent to creating “proper” articles. However, with the much-hyped next billion internet users, many of them limited to the smaller Wikipedias, banging on our virtual door, such a mechanism could be a stop-gap measure to provide at least basic information in smaller languages, in a user-friendly way. Details of text generation for those languages, infoboxes, integration into Wikipedia proper, redlink markup, etc. would have to be worked out for this to happen.<\/p>\n

\"Dave<\/a>

Dave Farrell, as rendered by the mash-up<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

UPDATE: Aaaand… my template introduction has been reverted<\/a>, effectively breaking the demo. I’m not going to start an edit war over this, you still have the screenshots.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I recently blogged about automatic descriptions based on Wikidata. And as nice as these APIs are, what could they be used for? You got it – demo time! Linkin Park band member Dave Farrell has no article on English Wikipedia (only a redirect to Linkin Park, which is unhelpful). He does, however, have a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wikidata"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/magnusmanske.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/magnusmanske.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/magnusmanske.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/magnusmanske.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/magnusmanske.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/magnusmanske.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":275,"href":"http:\/\/magnusmanske.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268\/revisions\/275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/magnusmanske.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/magnusmanske.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/magnusmanske.de\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}